Transcript

00:00:02

>> A PR mess that's proving tricky to clean up. A chinese detergent company apologizing, sort of, for an ad that swooped up huge controversy. If you're not one of the millions who have seen it already on YouTube, it show a girl sticking a black man into a washing machine, and he emerges looking quite different.

00:00:20

The company came up over the weekend saying, we strongly contempt racism. But it also layed the blame on internet users and media who have quote, read too much into the ad.>> I'm Anita Lin in Shanghai, the accusations of racism seemed to be coming mostly from overseas. In fact, the ad aired on TV here for about two months.

00:00:41

And didn't really provoke much reaction until an English language news blog wrote about it last week. But going by the reaction on social media, most Chinese don’t really see what the big deal is. Many micro-bloggers are not convinced that there's discrimination here. One writing, in a country without any racism it's not that sensitive an issue.

00:01:01

Another posting, China doesn't have a history of enslaving black people and no motive to discriminate against them. A lot of Internet users here are criticizing the company, but not for racism. They're accusing Shanghai Leishun of ripping off the idea from an Italian detergent ad. And there are a lot of similarities, from the scene between a man, a woman, and washing machine, down to the music.

00:01:26

The final message, however, is a little different. The machine does its magic with a skinny white man. The takeaway, colored is better.